Books

Full Cry

winner of the Stevens Manuscript Competitionsponsored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societiesavailable from Amazon.com

“I enjoy the gentleness of these poems, their precision, their good humor, their sometimes sprightly, sometimes melancholy delicacy. The way they capture the world’s soft moments, the hushed utterances and muted tones that gather in the margins. Their warmth and intimacy, like family letters written in longhand on yellowed, age-crinkled paper and passed down from one generation to the next. Read them slowly, let them unfold at their own pace, in their own time, in your hands, in your inner ear.”

—Troy Jollimore

“It is the meditative, the narrative, the lyric, the range of the possibilities of poetic voice—sometimes within a single poem—that mounts steadily through this collection to rise into the full cry of the title. The phrase suggests fierce pursuit, and Lisa Ampleman is after big game: a Thou for the I, an exploration of human connection in flesh, and spirit, too—most elusive prey, all of it. But she’s a subtle tracker. Without a hint of the overblown—no wail in the cry these poems make—the book gives us the emotion, and the pleasure at its skillful rendering. I admire the way Ampleman triangulates on feeling, so that with two landscapes and a flash of story, say, or two stories and a cityscape, a poem will stake out the emotional truth of a situation, a truth told slant and more powerful for it.”

—Jason Sommer

I’ve Been Collecting This to Tell You

“In the old story of love and loss, Lisa Ampleman’s I’ve Been Collecting This to Tell You cuts to the core of the matter with concision and subtlety. Hearts are laid bare, dissected, even grown anew. Masterfully structured and alert to the most vital details, this collection has lots to tell us—and a voice at once authentic and lyrical with which to do it.”—Don Bogen

“In these poems, the beloved is a space the speaker moves through—at first with trepidation, then with gathering force— emerging finally into a hard-won world ravishing in its clarity under a brutally beautiful “sky pinking up/ like a newly healed limb.” The poems of Lisa Ampleman’s collection don’t flinch, and the reward of their acute seeing is a song that’s sustenance itself.”—Kerri Webster

“Lisa Ampleman’s subtle and beautifully wrought poems make way for the possibility that all is not ‘frenzy’ in this ‘agitated world.’ Although we might be ‘the walking wounded,’ and ‘like Thomas/ need the scars to believe,’ the poems assure us that we heal, that wholeness and grace await us.”—Eric Pankey

“A prairie is plain, they say—those who have not stood in one. And so, too, is an ordinary heartbreak, until Lisa Ampleman begins to unfold it in these closely observed and quietly surprising poems. Salvation doesn’t live here, but there’s plenty to salvage in the wry, self-effacing metaphors by which she harvests what wisdom experience yields.”—Susan Tichy